NASA's $17.5B Budget Keeps Asteroid Mission On Track

The White House has proposed a $17.5 billion fiscal 2015 budget for NASA. The new budget aligns with NASA's "strategic plan" to prioritize space technologies essential to making advances in science, aeronautics, and space exploration, said the agency.

The budget, which is slightly less than the $17.6 billion fiscal 2014 budget, supports one of the biggest missions currently in the works at NASA: to send humans to an asteroid by 2025. The mission will include efforts to identify and characterize asteroids; a technology demonstration of high-power long-life solar electric propulsion; the development of the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion vehicle to fly humans beyond low-Earth orbit; and research and development of new technologies for deep-space exploration. NASA has requested that Congress approve $133 million for early development of the asteroid project.

"We have to develop technologies for our asteroid mission to fund subsequent missions to Mars," said NASA administrator Charles Bolden during the agency's budget briefing on March 4. The funds also will go toward missions to other planets, such as Jupiter and Pluto, and a potential mission to Europa, Bolden said.

Another major area of focus for NASA is launching spacecraft from US soil, and ending the agency's contract with Russia to fly astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). In 2010, the Obama Administration created a public-private partnership plan, called the Commercial Crew Program (CCP), to help NASA reach that goal. But NASA failed to receive the requested funding for the CCP from Congress last year, delaying US launches until 2017.

The proposed fiscal 2015 budget allocates $7.88 billion to human spaceflight operations. This includes continued commercial development of US crew transportation systems, scheduled for certification by 2017, according to NASA. It also extends operation of the ISS to at least 2024. NASA plans to launch 16 science and ISS cargo missions in 2015.

Source: Wikipedia

A chunk ($706 million) of the budget will be used for space technology. Among other things, NASA said the money will go toward seven launches over 24 months, including the Deep Space Atomic Clock, Green Propellant, Sunjammer Solar Sail, and four small spacecraft demos. Part of that money will also fund solar arrays, thrusters, and power management for a high-powered solar electric propulsion system used for satellites and the asteroid mission.

Some of NASA's projects were pushed into 2015 because of cuts in appropriations last year, NASA chief financial officer Elizabeth Robinson said during the briefing. With Congressional approval, NASA hopes to receive nearly $886 million in additional funding in fiscal year 2015 to focus on specific priorities, under the President's Opportunity, Growth, and Security Initiative. This initiative focuses on innovation and technology development to grow the US economy.

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Elena Malykhina began her career at The Wall Street Journal, and her writing has appeared in various news media outlets, including Scientific American, Newsday, and the Associated Press. For several years, she was the online editor at Brandweek and later Adweek, where she ... View Full Bio

It's great to hear that the US space programme is going to regain some measure of independence from Russian spacecraft soon enough.

I'm also blown away that it's a feasable goal to land humans on an asteroid. Hitting a target that small in space takes some incredibly impressive calculations, especially since they won't really be able to rely on their target's gravity to capture them as they could with a planet.

One fact that didn't make it into the story: $4.97 billion of NASA's budget will go toward science, including the 2018 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, dubbed the "next great observatory." It will serve thousands of astronomers worldwide and allow them to study every phase in the history of our universe.

Everyone is hailing the public/private partnership to end our deal with Russia -- however, consider that this is not just about money and rides to space. It's about international cooperation. No, it wasn't enough to make Putin a responsible actor on the global stage, as the Crimea situation shows, but it must foster some goodwill among the Russian people.

The world is getting smaller and more interconnected and I'd like to see more partnerships for lofty human endeavors like landing on asteroids, not fewer.